Status Updates From Sister Outsider: Essays and...

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?"

"feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden the fact in the same place where we have hidden our power."

"Am i altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action?"

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives."

"We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it."

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring through those lives."

"Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being harvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no matter what you may say about censorship, they are still reading, and they're reading an awful lot."

"We are more blind to what we have than to what we have not."

"I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I've always suspected, outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves."

"I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue."